A stolen manuscript, part two: The plagiarist begs for forgiveness as another group plagiarizes the same work

In 2019, we wrote about a reviewer who stole a manuscript and published it under his own name. Today, we bring you the sequel.

The sequel involves a plea for forgiveness after the plagiarized paper was retracted, and a second allegation of stealing work – which has prompted the target of the plagiarism to wonder if a more serious response from the journal to the first instance would have discouraged the second. 

We obtained an email the reviewer, Yuvarajan Devarajan, sent after the retraction to Mina Mehregan, a mechanical engineer at Ferdowsi University of Mashhad in Iran whose work he copied. In it, he explains what happened, and asks, beginning in all caps in the subject line, for her to “FORGIVE ME IF POSSIBLE”:

First, I would like to inform you that I have made the biggest mistake in life by plagiarizing your work. Because of which I am physical, mentally, and finically [sic] disturbed to the core.  I am now facing the worst situation of my life. I have badly treated by my family, friends, supervisors, and co-workers. I am now in the position where my life is completely shell-shocked and cannot function further with ease.

I as a researcher have no real intentions of copying your work. My intention at that point was to make a replica of your work using neat biodiesel.  I also carried out this work using the local amenities. Nevertheless, due to lack of time and job pressure, I could not rephrase the majority portion of the manuscript during initial submission. However, I also made a sincere effort to change the complete content of the same, but the manuscript was accepted and was published within the less than 10 days. The complete processing time between submission and acceptance took less than a week time.  Hence, I was helpless.

After enumerating the consequences he experienced of the plagiarism coming to light, he concluded: “Please forgive me. I will never repeat these activities in my near future.”

Though Devarajan’s email directly admits to committing plagiarism, the retraction notice on his paper only acknowledges “text overlap with a previously published article.” Mehregan told us: 

Yuvarajan Devarajan plagiarized our paper intentionally, but no one can find out about the real reason of retraction from the retraction statement unless they read about it on your blog or they contact us directly in this regard. 

Devarajan’s email says that all his submissions to “ESPR” (presumably Environmental Science and Pollution Research, the journal that published Mehregan’s paper that he reviewed and then plagiarized) have been rejected without consideration, “which hugely spoiled my career.” 

But Mehregan notes that even after the retraction, Devarajan has published papers both in Environmental Science and Pollution Research and in the journal that retracted his paper after receiving evidence of plagiarism. 

Therefore, I strongly want that this issue becomes clear for the scientific community once and for all. Because his unethical conduct did more harm to us than himself.

Devarajan did not respond when we reached out for comment. 

Meanwhile, Mehregan discovered another paper that was suspiciously similar to hers that had already been hijacked. 

The paper, “Influence of injection parameters on NOx emission from biodiesel powered diesel engine by Taguchi technique,” was published by the International Journal of Ambient Energy in 2018. It has been cited 16 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science, including seven times by articles in the same journal. 

None of the authors overlap with Devarajan’s paper that copied hers, but his two coauthors on that paper and all the authors on the IJAE paper are affiliated with the department of mechanical engineering at Sathyabama University in Chennai, India.  

“This paper not only plagiarized our original idea without giving credit to our work, but it is also full of data fabrication,” Mehregan told us. 

Emails we obtained show Mehregan’s correspondence with the journal about the issue going back to 2019. In January of 2020, she laid out the issues she saw to Bailey Young, then a portfolio manager at Taylor & Francis, which publishes the International Journal of Ambient Energy. In part: 

Please be informed that the text may be different from our research paper, but the whole idea is exactly the same and there is no originality and novelty in this fraudulent paper. The authors literally stole the idea, utilized all the exact input parameters of our original research and just tried to add three more levels to the design factors (which is far from the Taguchi concept) to make some differences.

All the results they have included in their text (Results and Discussion section) are exactly the same with our work. Even the contribution ratio for each parameter is the exact amount of ours which definitely cannot be true according to the figures 5-8 in their paper. (According to these figures, their conclusion about mixing length is also invalid. That conclusion is related to the figure 2 in our paper.)

As well as, in the Abstract section, the authors have stated that they’ve employed L9 Taguchi array while they used L36 array according to Table 2. L9 Orthogonal array has been used in our investigation. It seems they have forgotten to change it in their plagiarized paper.

…

We cannot let them steal this novel idea of our original work and publish this awful plagiarized version of our research and get away easily with what they have done. We will pursue this issue until this fraudulent paper is withdrawn from the web.

After a year of trying to get experts to review the papers, Young wrote to Mehregan in January of 2021: 

Happy new year! I hope you’ve had a lovely holiday season.

I wanted to inform you of next steps. I have not received a response from anyone I’ve contacted regarding your claims. As a result, we will be bringing the claims directly to the author for a response.

Mehregan and Young exchanged a few more emails, but then she heard nothing back. She tried following up last December: 

Almost one year has passed since our last correspondence and I have not heard from you since. Given that the article is still available on the journal website, it seems the authors just denied their obvious data fabrication in the paper and the investigation team simply believed them. I would be appreciative if you kindly inform me about the latest update about this issue.

She got no answer. Young appears to have started a new position at Clarivate in January, according to her LinkedIn profile. 

We reached out to the journal’s editor-in-chief, Neil Hewitt of the University of Ulster, who said he would refer our query to the journal. We haven’t heard anything further. 

The corresponding author of the paper, S. Manigandan of Sathyabama University, told us: 

We have received the mail from the Ambient energy Journal in January 2021 and we have provided the explanation about the false claim by the anonymous. We have submitted the detailed report to the concern team and they have accepted the explanation. So far we didn’t receive any emails from the Journal after the explanation provided. 

Mehregan sees a connection between her two experiences with plagiarism of the same paper: 

Maybe if Yuvarajan Devarajan and his co-authors had been dealt with seriously, these individuals would not have dared to repeat the same indecent work without facing the consequences.

Like Retraction Watch? You can make a tax-deductible contribution to support our work, follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, add us to your RSS reader, or subscribe to our daily digest. If you find a retraction that’s not in our database, you can let us know here. For comments or feedback, email us at [email protected].